Even the N.R.A. Thinks Trump’s Gun Nonsense “Defies Common Sense”

Roughly one month after the National Rifle Association endorsedDonald Trump for president, the staunch gun-rights organization admitted the New York billionaire took his pro-gun rhetoric one step too far by suggesting that Orlando clubgoers would have been safer if they had been armed.

The presumptive G.O.P. nominee declared to a Houston crowd on Friday that attendees of Pulse, the gay nightclub that became the site of the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history last week, should have been carrying weapons. “If some of those wonderful people had gun strapped right here—right to their waist or right to their ankle—and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes ‘boom, boom,’ you know that would have been a beautiful sight folks,” Trump said at the rally, New York magazine reports.

Days later, in an interview on ABC’s This Week, the N.R.A.’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, was forced to counter the statement made by Trump, the man behind whom gun advocates in America were supposed to unite in order to protect “individual freedom in this country.” When asked if he supported the real-estate mogul’s suggestion, Cox first attempted to rationalize the statement. “What Donald Trump has said is that the American people know as common sense, if somebody had been there to stop this faster, fewer people would have died,” he said. But when pressured to take a stance on whether or not it was a good idea for people to be partying with weapons, he told ABC, “No one thinks people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms. That defies common sense. It also defies the law.”

Shortly after Cox’s ABC interview, N.R.A. C.E.O. Wayne LaPierre doubled down on disavowing the proposal that people should carry firearms while drinking in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, (though a tweet later clarified it would be O.K. to carry at restaurants where they serve alcohol). He did, however, add that every American “needs to start having a security plan. We to be able to protect ourselves because they’re coming."

These statements come just ahead of a contentious gun-control vote in the Senate. The vote, which is scheduled for Monday following a nearly 15-hour filibuster by Senator Chris Murphy that forced the legislation to the floor in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando just over a week ago, will focus on background checks for secondary-market gun purchases and barring individuals on terrorism watch lists from buying firearms. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the N.R.A. tweeted that its position “is no guns for terrorists—period. Due process & right to self-defense for law abiding Americans,” but whether or not that will translate to actual legislation remains to be seen.

Update: 10:15 A.M. On Monday, Trump tried to walk back his comments. “When I said that if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees,” he tweeted. It was quite clear in the presidential hopeful’s original remarks, however, that this was not what he meant. In separate interviews, the former reality TV star also made it clear he was referring to victims being armed. For instance, the day following the Orlando attack, the Associated Press reports Trump told radio host Howie Carr, “It's too bad that some of the young people that were killed over the weekend didn't have guns.”